madison

5 ways cloud 'supercharges' enterprise initiatives

By | January 27, 2012, 9:46pm PST

Summary: Among other things, cloud computing’s support for rapid development and utility-style billing can counter fears about most IT shadow projects.

Cloud in and of itself may or may not add value to the business, but it certainly can help supercharge other key enterprise initiatives.

Cloud can be positioned as the platform for a range of initiatives intended to help increase the agility and ability of the organization’s business technology. That’s the gist of a new book, authored by Pankaj Arora, Raj Biyani and Salil Dave, all Microsoft executives.

In To the Cloud: Powering an Enterprise, the authors explain how enterprise cloud benefits other initiatives within the enterprise:

1) Invest in shared services: “The ability to share physical servers is one cloud benefit, but the cloud can do more. Because a cloud scale unit caan be more granular than an application, enterprises can create functional components that can be shared across applications.”

2) Consolidate global platforms: “In the cloud, global platforms can become a set of globally hosted, loosely coupled services with a logical architecture, versus a service hosted in a single region but offered broadly.”

3) Simplify application portfolios: “Migrating an ecosystem to the cloud presents the opportunity to improve it.”

4) Improve user experiences: “The cloud’s ability to process information on behalf of devices with weaker CPUs, along with the ease of network access available via public clouds, will help IT meet user expectations.”

5) Onboard shadow IT applications: “It is not uncommon to discover that shadow applications support important processes in an enterprise,” the authors observe. “Cloud computing’s support for rapid development and utility-style billing can counter fears about most shadow projects.”

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily e-mail newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

Topics

Joe McKendrick is an author, consultant and speaker specializing in trends and developments shaping the technology industry.

Disclosure

Joe McKendrick

Joe McKendrick is an independent consultant, editor and speaker.

Joe has performed project work (white papers, articles, blogs, research and presentations) for the following companies in the IT marketspace:

  • CBS Interactive/CNET/ZDNet (this blog)
  • ebizQ
  • Evans Data
  • Gartner
  • IBM
  • Informatica
  • IDC
  • Microsoft
  • Systinet/HP
  • Teradata
  • Unisphere Reseach, a division of Information Today, Inc.
  • WebLayers

Joe has also performed research work for the following sponsoring organizations in partnership with Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc.

  • IBM
  • Luminex
  • Noetix
  • Oracle Corp.
  • Teradata
  • Informatica
  • International Oracle Users Group
  • Oracle Applications Users Group
  • Professional Association for SQL Server
  • International DB2 Users Group
  • International Sybase Users Group
  • SHARE (IBM large systems users group)

Biography

Joe McKendrick

Joe McKendrick is an author and independent analyst who tracks the impact of information technology on management and markets. Joe is co-author, along with 16 leading industry leaders and thinkers, of the SOA Manifesto, which outlines the values and guiding principles of service orientation. He also speaks frequently on Enterprise 2.0 and SOA topics at industry events and Webcasts. As an independent analyst, he has also authored numerous research reports in partnership with Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc. for user groups such as SHARE, Oracle Applications Users Group, and International DB2 Users Group. Joe is also an active SOA contributor for ebizQ/TechTarget. In a previous life, Joe served as director of the Administrative Management Society (AMS), an international professional association dedicated to advancing knowledge within the IT and business management fields. He is a graduate of Temple University.

Talkback Most Recent of 3 Talkback(s)

  • RE: 5 ways cloud 'supercharges' enterprise initiatives
    And if you read it carefully, it means nothing.

    "Because a cloud scale unit caan be more granular than an application"

    Kinda impossible to talk about granularity if you don't have anything to compare. Granularity of what? CPU time? Memory?

    Cloudy language for cloud computing. Incoherence FTW!
    ZDNet Gravatar
    CobraA1
    28th Jan
  • Captain Query on the planet of the evil cloud salesmen.
    Captain Query and Commander Spid are trapped in a multi-dimensional PowerPoint presentation on the planet of the evil cloud salesmen.

    Evil Cloud Salesman: Our product offers a multi-tier, highly extendable, hot pluggable service layer, embodying a loosely coupled cloud enabled, customer facing user experience.

    Query: Do you understand what he's on a about Spid?

    Spid: It is exceedingly hard to find any logic in his words captain.

    ECS: Out product delivers a scaleable enterprise service bus, captain you ship is called the Enterprise, surely our product must be right for you?

    Query: The Enterprise is not a bus, it's a starship.

    ECS (Smiling superciliously): I know that captain, our enterprise service bus allows you to seamlessly deliver data to any part of your starship, or indeed the whole federation!

    Query: Spid, do we need this stuff?

    Spid: The Federation's quantum relational DBMS ensures that all data is simultaneously available immediately at all places in the universe. The methods this alien proposes would involve duplicating data, duplicating data can lead to inconsistencies, and inconsistencies are illogical captain.

    ECS : But our product is fully XXXML enabled!

    Query: WTF is XXXML, Spid?

    Spid: The Ramwlans used it to implement their cloaking device sir. A single burst can block the entire network of an attacking ship making their sensors useless and effectively rendering the Ramwlans' ship invisible.

    Unfortunately an unattended cartesian product generating XXXML on a Ramwlan server consumed the entire bandwidth of the Ramwlan empire causing the collapse of their, and several neighboring, civilizations.

    Query: Sounds dangerous Spid.

    Spid: Indeed captain, some people have referred to it as a data management doomsday weapon.

    ECS (getting increasingly desperate): Our product is a remotely hosted, high availability, web enabled, granular system architecture; it's a whole new paradigm, gentlemen!

    Query: (flipping open his communicator to talk to the ship's engineer): Beam me up Scsi, there's no intelligent life down here.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    jorwell
    29th Jan
  • RE: 5 ways cloud 'supercharges' enterprise initiatives
    Cloud really means optimizing what you had before. Taking it like means we are talking about many more things than servers, storage etc. To help drive the enterprise cloud needs to stack up alongside other changing events like service desk, mobility, business intelligence, collaboration. A long list. Cloud for many is the enabler of some of these of course but is too often wrapped round fancy language by sales people that does one of two things (1) confuse the hell out of people who dont buy (2) end up selling something that is not fit for purpose because no one really thought long and hard enough.
    IMHO Cloud is encrypted text for Right meaning 'what is right for one's business'

    BrummieRuss.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    paulruss
    28th Jan

Talkback - Tell Us What You Think

Formatting +
BB Codes - Note: HTML is not supported in forums
  • [b] Bold [/b]
  • [i] Italic [/i]
  • [u] Underline [/u]
  • [s] Strikethrough [/s]
  • [q] "Quote" [/q]
  • [ol][*] 1. Ordered List [/ol]
  • [ul][*] · Unordered List [/ul]
  • [pre] Preformat [/pre]
  • [quote] "Blockquote" [/quote]
Click Here

The best of ZDNet, delivered

ZDNet Newsletters

Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox

Facebook Activity

White Papers, Webcasts, & Resources